Next week is Nikita’s 14th birthday! Although we come up with new nicknames for her every few days–and so there have been thousands of names, we rarely write them down and often forget them as ever new names take the stage.

For this birthday, I thought I’d write down the new name I spontaneously called her tonight: Hungry Monkognonis.

I’m really not trying to turn this into a cat blog or anything, but this is just too funny. Nikita has made “friends” with our raspberry bushes. Jay thinks maybe it has something to do with their proximity to the catnip and cat grass (i.e. she takes a few chomps of the grass, smells the nip, and the raspberry bushes turn into something more than they really are….) In any case, she really loves them.

It’s Nikita’s 13th birthday today, and considering we did one of her most *unfavorite* things today (vacuumed), I decided I should at least put a little tribute up for her on the blog. I’ll also give her a couple treats since she could care less about the blog. Anyways, here are a couple more photos from her kitty youth:

She still gives us this look today:

We called this her “rabbit pose” (she doesn’t really do this anymore):

This is one of my favorite portraits of her from her early years living in the country:

If you know Nikita (the cat) or Rube (the fish), you know there’s a lot of chillin’ that happens at Fine and Full Manor. Even when we’re not there, of course.

Fortuitously, Ian (Anastasia’s cousin) is chillin’ at Fine and Full Manor now—and so there’s like a power trio thing going on, except, since it’s all chillin’, it’s not really so much a “power” trio, but like a quantum counter spin / looks like you’re going backwards but it’s really so fast it’s time travel thing—as seen is this most excellent picture:

A cat is baffling his owner by wandering off at night before expecting to be collected by car every morning at exactly the same time and place.

The whole idea of the cat wandering far for treats makes sense, considering Nikita. But, Bernard and I had this cat, Radiance, in Santa Cruz, whom we both would run into at good distances from our place.

I know Bernard used to hang out in this park, and Radiance would just suddenly show up and hang out with him. And, one time I was riding on the bus, and was all the way across town, and saw Radiance walking down the sidewalk!

For those of you who know our cat Nikita, you know she’s been on a diet for a while. Last we measured, she was down from 22lbs to 18lbs (a good feat for a cat). Of course the vet says she should weigh about 10–so there’s a long way to go baby. So this diet she’s been on is high protein, very low carb, wet food (more like a cat’s natural diet). Nikita is obsessed with carbs. She loves anything crunchy and salty (chips, bread crusts, crackers, popcorn, etc.) If we eat any of the above she hovers around us waiting for scraps. Today I accidentally dropped brown sugar on the floor, and she was all over it. Brown sugar? Who would have thought….